Vachon Imagined

I remember when a friend was going through a brutal divorce. She looked at me with exhausted eyes and asked, “When does this get easier?”

I laughed.

“Any day now.”

It’s still one of my better jokes.

The part I didn’t tell her was that I wasn’t laughing because it gets easier. I was laughing because life has terrible timing. It keeps showing up every morning like an overly cheerful coworker carrying a fresh pot of coffee while your world is still smoldering.

The bills still arrive.

The dog still wants to be fed.

Someone in front of you at the grocery store still has seventeen coupons and exact change.

A loved one dies, your marriage ends, your heart breaks, and somehow Tuesday has the audacity to become Wednesday.

The world doesn’t stop.

It can’t.

But somewhere along the way it quietly begins asking questions that no one ever agreed were fair.

How long are you going to be sad?

Shouldn’t you be over this by now?

Haven’t you moved on?

I’ve spent years writing about healing, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s this: life doesn’t move on nearly as much as it returns.

People say time heals all wounds, but I don’t think memory works that way. It doesn’t disappear. It simply takes a seat in another room. You stop noticing it for a while, and then one ordinary Tuesday it wanders back into the kitchen wearing the same old sweater, sits down across from you, and says, “Remember me?”

And just like that, you’re there again.

Presence helps. It really does. The daggers become less like knives and more like weather. They still arrive, but they don’t own the sky forever.

Even so, not long ago I stumbled into something I thought I’d long since made peace with, only to discover that peace isn’t the absence of memory. It’s the willingness to sit beside it without demanding that it leave.

Maybe that’s the gift.

Memory is not the enemy.

It is proof that we were here.

Proof that someone mattered.

Proof that something inside us loved enough to leave fingerprints.

There has never been another person who has lived your exact life. No one has stood where you’ve stood, lost what you’ve lost, celebrated what you’ve celebrated, or carried your particular collection of invisible souvenirs. We spend our lives trying to bridge that impossible distance. Some of us write. Some talk until two in the morning. Others sit in silence, pray, meditate, or simply keep showing up.

They’re all saying the same thing.

“This is what it was like to be me.”

The other day I was talking to my best friend, who has the remarkable ability to know me better than I know myself. It’s honestly a little irritating. Every now and then she’ll casually throw out an observation that lands with the force of a cartoon sound effect.

Kaboom.

Cablam.

And there I am, staring at my own life from an angle I hadn’t considered.

We were talking about motherhood.

At some point I heard myself say that after losing our second child, I eventually lost the longing to become a mother again.

I believed it.

It had been years.

The perfume had left the room.

Or so I thought.

Then, over the last couple of days, something shifted.

I found myself remembering what it felt like to hold an infant against my chest. The impossible softness. The tiny weight that somehow carried an entire universe. The warmth of a sleeping baby whose breathing quietly teaches your own body how to breathe.

I remembered life growing beneath my skin.

I remembered becoming someone new while another little person was becoming themselves.

Then today I saw a young mother holding her baby.

And before I could stop it, envy found me.

Not because I wanted her life.

Because I missed mine.

I missed a season I didn’t know was disappearing while I was busy living it.

That’s the peculiar cruelty of time.

It never asks for permission.

It never leans over and whispers, “Just so you know, this is the last time you’ll rock your child to sleep.”

It simply lets the moment happen.

Then it folds it into memory.

Years later, when you’ve become convinced you’ve made peace with everything, memory quietly opens the drawer where it has kept that moment safe all along.

It places it gently into your hands.

And for a little while, you hold your life again.

Maybe that is what healing really is.

Not forgetting.

Not moving on.

But discovering that even when memory returns with tears in its eyes, you no longer ask it to leave.

You make room for it at the table.

You pour it a cup of coffee.

And together, you watch another ordinary Wednesday arrive.